Adrants: Mazda Launches Blog to 'Viralize' Video

Mazda's new blog-cum-viral marketing effort proved to be pretty lame, and its failures reveal one of the dynamics limiting large advertisers in their exploitation of new forms of marketing. The campaign takes an old set of video "viral" ads that never became very popular months ago and attempts to rejuvenate them by creating a fake blog to tout them. Compounding the first failure (not understanding that a viral ad isn't just a :30 - perhaps with a dirty joke or a flash of skin - that gets streamed onto the internet) Mazda committed the same mistake with the blog.

In the first instance, it thought its TV ad could become a viral spot. In the second instance, it thought it could suffice as the main content of a blog. Viewers may begin to think that perhaps there's a creative director in Mazda's ad agency that has a bias toward canned video. It appears that in neither case did Mazda consider putting the vast resources required to create a well-produced video spot toward creating a well-produced online campaign. Or, if it did, it paid too much.